#29. SPRING LOSSES IN THE APIARY

Meager signs of spring:  glory-of-the-snow

In reviewing my post of just over a year ago (#27) I approached the vernal equinox 2013 with 5 hives.  However, March was, as I say in the post, the cruelest month.  By April I was down to just 2 colonies.  Included in those spring losses was my favorite Red Hive.
I went into this past winter with 5 hives.  Two were established hives that survived last winter (one 2 and the other 3 years old), one was a very small 'split' made from an extra queen cell I had kicking around from one of those 2 hives.  The other 2 colonies contained the new queens I had grafted in our new Long Island queen rearing program last spring (see post #28).  I didn't think the little split would make it through the winter and I was right.  Unfortunately, one of my grafted queen colonies has also died, and very recently.  Particularly sad since this was the first queen I ever grafted, and they were alive up until a couple of weeks ago.
This winter has been brutal.  We had an unusual amount of snow, and some really cold temperatures.  But from a bee's perspective those are not the biggest problems.  It is a winter warming trend followed by a cold snap that is often death to bees:  the warm weather stimulates the queen to lay, then the cold comes and the nurse bees die trying to keep the brood warm.  My grafted queen colony did exactly that.  As soon as we got a warm day or two, they were active and flying more than the other hives.  I worried that they were being imprudent, and my concerns were apparently well-founded.
It was looking like it would be a late spring this year - about a week ago the temperature dropped from upper 50's down to the low 20's.  There is little food around for the bees.  There are a few crocus around the neighborhood, and snow drops, but even my super-early glory-of-the-snow has only just begun to emerge.  So I decided to try something I haven't done before now, and that is to feed my bees pollen patties to supplement this early dearth of natural pollen.  A pollen patty is a thin slab of thick brown paste that comes sandwiched between wax paper.  You peel off the paper and press the patty down onto the frames and let the bees have at it.  I had already begun feeding the bees sugar syrup, but they are not taking a lot of it yet.
Today was warm enough - just barely - for me to crack open the hives and slide in the pollen patties.  I watched the bees that were flying to see if they were bringing pollen in themselves yet.  I did see some, but it was meager.  Nevertheless, bees bringing in pollen means that there is a laying queen in the hive, so I'm cautiously optimistic that my three remaining hives have now made it into a new year.
My friend Richard, whose 2 hives I had moved to my property in autumn 2012, neither of which survived that winter, got 2 replacement packages that I installed last May when I moved the hives back to his nearby summer house.  I didn't like one of the packages, and I had suspected that the queen died shortly after the installation.  Because his bees hadn't survive the move to my place the year before, I talked him into leaving the hives in place and that I'd go over and check them from time to time.  I've just come back from  Richard's, and whoa! does he have a huge colony in the one hive that survived.  Plenty of honey, possibly partly because they 'robbed out' the dead hive and sucked it dry of all its stores of honey.  And I just put in a slab of pollen.  I have to say, though, that they seem pretty mean, so we'll see how easy it is to manage them when I start working them later this spring.  This was a package that came from the deep South and may be Africanized.  If so, the hive will be a candidate for 're-queening' with one of our Long Island queens later in the season.  

#28. Breeding Long Island Honey Bees - a New Queen Rearing Program

Snow-covered hives, February 2014

Hard to believe, but the day before this photo was taken the bees were flying.  The air temperature got up to 46˚F, but with the sun hitting the boxes, the area around the hives may have climbed to around 50˚.  There was quite a lot of activity at 3 of my 5 colonies, and the other 2 were iffy.  Of course bees alive in February is absolutely no guarantee of survival, which can only be assessed after the Spring solstice at the earliest (see my last post).  Still, it was very exciting to see some hive activity.

I had a different sort of beekeeping season last year with almost no honey harvest and no swarming.  Most of my energy went into aggressive, early swarm prevention, by splitting colonies and moving  and rearranging hive bodies.  The goal was to prep my hives to accept new queens that I would be breeding with a group of Long Island beekeepers.  My beekeeping teacher Ray Lackey offered a challenge to members of the Long Island Beekeepers (LIBC) to start a group dedicated to breeding better bees on Long Island.  We had the first meeting at Ray's house in Bohemia and decided to start with 3 queens from which we would breed many - how many? - like possibly 300! - queens to share among local beekeepers.  The goal was to incorporate the ideal qualities of disease resistance, good temperament, climate hardiness, and good honey production in one or more strains of bees that will ultimately improve the DNA of all our Long Island bees.  'Imported bees', that is, those brought in from other regions, can carry diseases and pests that can infect our local populations.  The theory is that by developing desirable genetic traits in local bees through selection, we would not have to rely as much on 'foreign' bees and our own local stock would be improved.

Breeding queens from selected genetic material is geeky, exacting work.  It requires that we graft bee larvae - produced by the selected queens  - into specially manufactured queen cups, mounted on modified frames - in order to cajole armies of workers to transform these generic worker larvae into queens.  I love the science-project nature of this endeavor.  Each one of us who committed to the project had to dedicate one or two of our hives to exclusively producing bees that would raise the queens.  No excess honey production was possible, as we continually 'stole' the bee power it takes to make honey and channelled it into the nursery.

Keeping in mind that any fertilized bee egg can turn into a queen if the conditions are right - i.e. larger cell and an exclusive diet of royal jelly - all we had to do was to transfer young (1 - 3 day-old) larvae from the bottom of worker cells and graft them into the bottom of larger queen cups.  These cups, plastic bases, actually, are mounted on special frames and presented to a queenless colony.  If everything is right, the worker bees, sensing the lack of a queen and desperate to produce a new one, will adopt properly-grafted eggs, build the characteristic long, wax cells atop the plastic bases and raise queens.  

Queen-rearing frame with plastic queen cups in place.

Great in theory, but tough to do in practice.  First, the larvae are tiny and difficult to handle, using dental-type tools.  They need to be lifted out of the original cells - without squishing them, of course - and then deposited into the bottom of the new cups in the same position that they were in the original cells; if they are mal-positioned, the larval feeding tube will be obscured and the tiny creature will be unable to feed.   Then, they need to be transported as quickly as possible, preferably keeping them moist and warm, to the awaiting colony.  This was where I was at a distinct disadvantage compared to the others who participated in this experiment.  There was no way I could get the eggs grafted in Bohemia and get back to Montauk to install the frames in less than 2 hours.  Nevertheless, I had some success.  My first frame yielded one queen, my second attempt yielded nothing, my third try produced 2 queens.  The net result was that I sold one queen to a beekeeper in Sag Harbor, and the other 2 went to build up my own hives.  So right now, 2 of my 5 colonies are headed by Long Island-bred 'engineered' queens.  Some of the other queen rearers had phenomenal success.  I think a few folks harvested 20 queens per frame.  

Capped queen cell from my first attempt at queen rearing.  May 2013.

I'm anxious to try my hand again this year.  Whether I do or not depends on whether my bees survive the winter.  Fingers crossed.   

Ultimately, if the project is successful enough over time, we will look into applying for a grant to fund a scientific assessment of representative colonies throughout Long Island.

#27. DEATH OF A BEEHIVE. Team Yellow R.I.P.

Glory-of-the-snow 

In beekeeping, they say that March is the cruelest month.  And it has proven so for my bees.  When I left Long Island for a trip to California on February 28, all 6 of my hives were alive.  On the occasional warmish day, bees would be flying, and I'd crack open the outer cover to look for movement within, and found it every time.

Besides my 6 hives, I have a client's 2 hives in my yard for the winter.  Shortly after moving Richard's hives to my place around October, I cleaned up his old hive bodies, a task that included adding newly-painted bottom boards.  The bright white boards allowed me to observe that these visiting bees were suffering from nosema apis, or bee dysentery.  It is easily diagnosed by the small, yellow speckles of bee diarrhea that the animals drop outside the hive.   Needless to say, I was alarmed and concerned.  It is difficult to say whether the bees had been afflicted for awhile or whether I was just able to diagnose the problem because the new bottom boards offered such a good color contrast.  (It would not be unusual for bees to begin exhibiting symptoms of a heretofore dormant illness as a result of stress - in this case, the stress of moving them from one property to another.)

Nosema will not necessarily kill off a colony unless the bees are already compromised by other factors.  (And who can know if those factors existed in this case?)  Still, I didn't want to take any chances, so I treated both Richard's and my hives, in case the nosema also spread into my colonies.  A drug called Fumagillin B is the standard treatment, and is administered by mixing the powder with sugar syrup.  Of course the treatment is only effective if the bees actually take the food, which Richard's bees did not want to do.  My 6 hives, however, were gulping the stuff like mad.

I had applied two doses to my colonies by the time I went to CA.  Yesterday, a lovely warmish day, with plenty of bees flying, I decided to apply a further dose of the treated syrup.  When I lifted the cover on the yellow hive, however, all I saw were dead bees.  I lifted the inner cover and saw more dead bees, most still clustered in the center of the frames.  Same thing in the box underneath.

    
The outer frames, like the one pictured here, were full of syrup (seen glistening in the comb), some of it capped, and attendant bees looked alive and as though they were working the frames - until I got close.  They were dead for sure, but appeared frozen in mid-motion.  I found a few cells of capped brood with healthy-looking - but dead - larvae inside.

My first thought is that the bees were stimulated into too much activity by the availability of food, in the form of the medicated syrup, and were done in by a cold snap.  This will, apparently, often happen at this time of the year.  As the weather warms, bees become active, the queen starts laying, the bees 'break cluster', and then a cold snap can come along and kill a colony.  The safest thing for bees to do during the early Spring is to stay in a tight cluster to conserve warmth.  Bees are, as one blogger recently put it, tropical insects that have adapted to temperate climates by clustering and choosing protective habitats.  Colder climates can really prove challenging to them:  they are easily chilled - and killed - by the vagary of our Spring.

Today is brutally cold - in the 20's.  Yesterday it was close to 50 and I watched a bee from the white hive bring in the season's first pollen.  I've spied a few dandelions blooming and this is a local harbinger of the laying season for bees.  The queen will have started laying in earnest when the protein source - flower pollen - started to enter the hive.  I will be anguishing over the fate of my other hives until the weather becomes more predictable.  As for Richard's hives, I have seen no activity and naturally fear the worst.

Team Yellow, the 'bad boy' of my hives; the colony that chased me around my yard all last Spring; the 'hottest' of my hives, is no more.  Despite their vile disposition, I am sorry to have lost them, and just hope that no other colonies suffer their fate.

#26. A beekeeper's New Year's resolutions.

New Year has come and gone, and 2 of my resolutions for 2013 involve bees.  I resolve to be a better beekeeper, and to be a better bee blogger.  I can't believe I have not posted since last May!

One of my goals in writing this blog was to use it as a sort of diary so that I could track my successes and failures and learn from them.  I had hoped that this would be of some value not just to me, but to other beekeepers.  I also wanted to have enough material of general interest to keep non-beekeepers entertained.  Well, I've pretty well screwed up the diary aspect since there's no way I can succinctly reconstruct an entire summer and fall of my beekeeper's year.  What I can do, however, is summarize where I am now and try to reinstate my old blogging schedule.

Last Spring the bees hit me with challenge after challenge.  They swarmed, and swarmed again.  The property was lousy with swarms, stray queens, and chaos.  I tried to make sense of it, and I have some theories.  My feelings of inadequacy were mitigated by the fact that so many Long Island beekeepers were going through much of what I was.  The unusually warm winter last year certainly played a part, but I think there were some things I could have done to control the situation.  For starters, I didn't go into the hives early enough in the season to be able to affect swarm conditions.  I also didn't put supers on early enough to keep the bees sufficiently busy.  The upside is that I was able to capture enough swarms to double my beeyard.  The downside is that the bees were so busy colonizing that they produced far less honey than the previous year, when I only had 3 hives!  The original superstar of my yard, Team Red, remained the top honey producer, even though they threw at least one swarm last spring.  I think I extracted about 40 lbs. of honey from the red hive.  Team Purple, which started as a swarm in 2011 turned out to be a pretty nice hive, and they produced about 20+ lbs.  Team Yellow, the original bad-boy of my initial two hives, remained problematic, throwing swarm after swarm after swarm, and ultimately producing no honey.

2011's 3 hives are now joined by swarm hives Orange, Blue and White.  I now have 3 hive stands instead of two, with 2 hives on each raised wooden platform.  I am using a 4-brood-box model instead of the 3-box hives I had last year.  Having said that, only 3 hives - the original 3 - were populous enough to warrant the 4th brood box I'd planned on.  The other 3 hives have between 2 and 3 brood boxes apiece.  So far this winter, there are live bees in all 6 hives.  This is more of a coup than I had realized:  at a bee meeting last week I found that most of the beekeepers in attendance had lost colonies already this winter.  

Some of the season's highlights are worth noting:

• I had the pleasure of having a queen bee hatch in my hand - by pure happenstance, I must add:  I was inspecting a hive and decided to remove a capped queen cell to see if I could reduce swarming.  I removed the wax cell and placed it in the palm of my hand, when the top popped open and a beautiful queen emerged.  I set her up with a few subjects, along with a frame each of honey and capped brood, and she thrived.   
• My life was changed for the better last summer when I broke down and bought an actual bee suit.  Until then I had been using a veil plus an army surplus flight suit one-sy.  Now I know that some of my beekeeping brethren use no protective clothing whatsoever.  My bees, however, are just not that warm and fuzzy.  And now that I don't have to worry about getting stung, my concentration can be directed 100% towards the bees instead of being distracted by wondering when - and where - I will be stung.
• I have taken on a beekeeping client.  It turns out that a summer resident who lives less than a mile from me has 2 hives.  He loves his bees but cannot devote any time to them since he lives in Manhattan and his business demands are such that he can never really know when he will be here - or for how long.  In November my buddy Woody and I moved Richard's hives to my yard for the winter.  So for now, at least, I'm up to 8 hives.  I expect that I'll be moving those colonies back to Richard's sometime this Spring.  Working with Richard's bees has broadened my experience immensely:  each of his colonies is in 10-frame double-deep brood boxes, compared to my puny 8-frame brood boxes .  Richard's are very well established, muscular hives, and each takes 2 honey supers, which I had to extract more than once during the season.  I think I extracted a total of about 120 lbs. of honey for him this past year, and I still had enough honey to leave both hives with a full super of honey for the winter.  The experience with Richard's bee has made me realize the importance of drawn comb; the bees can spend all their time making and storing honey instead of spending a lot of resources making wax and building comb.  My young bee colonies are all still in the build-up stage, with me constantly adding new, undrawn frames for them to work.  Next season I will help them out by using wax foundation on wooden frames in the honey supers.  The bees really do not seem to like drawing out the plastic Pierco frames that I have been using exclusively up until now.
• I made a few entries at the Long Island Fair again this year, and did much better than last year.  My honey - in 2 classes - won first prizes.  And I entered a block of beeswax this year as well, and also took a first.  All of my vegetable entries took prizes, a few of them firsts.
• I also participated in the LIBC (Long Island Beekeeping Club)annual honey judging contest, and took a couple of ribbons, although a first place escaped me.  I did, though, take first prize for the second year for my 'gadget entry', this year's was a devise to capture swarms that I cobbled together from a one-gallon plastic pretzel jar mounted on a piece of PVC pipe.  It worked great for me during the last swarm season.

One of the highlights so far this winter has been using hive products to make soap.  My friend and fellow beekeeper Tricia hosted a workshop at her home and a group of us made several kinds of soap using natural ingredients.  My favorite was the goat milk soap that incorporated honey and beeswax.  It's creamy, dreamy stuff.

The new and improved, enormous vegetable garden did not disappoint.  It is definitely a work in progress, but the freezer is packed with delicacies, like pestos, soups, and tomato sauce.  And I'm still working my way through the garlic and potatoes.

#25. SWARM SEASON

I'm not sure if it's because of something I did, or something I didn't do, or if it has nothing to do with me at all, but there is major swarm activity at the hives.  About a week ago, a huge swarm issued from the yellow hive.  If they had flown off, I was prepared to say "good riddance", as the Wicked Queen would most likely have flown off with the swarm.  Instead, the bees gathered all over the base of the hive stand.  Within an hour, they had re-entered the yellow hive.  This same routine was repeated several more times early that week, but Wednesday afternoon the swarm finally took to the air - and landed in the very same red cedar tree as did both swarms from this same hive last summer.  (See blog post #17  for those swarm details.)  I started to collect the swarm in a nuc box, but thought better of it after speaking to my friend Peter.


When he heard the size of the swarm - roughly  that of a large leg of Parma ham - he suggested I put them straight into a full-sized hive box filled with frames that included one frame of brood from the 'mother' yellow hive.  He said the frame of brood would help anchor them to their new hive.  I placed an empty super on top of theframes to act as a sort of funnel, and shook the bees in.  By that evening Team Orange, as they are now known, were on a make-shift hive stand just five feet from the original Team Yellow, and with a feeder filled with sugar syrup to give them a head start on  building wax comb on the new frames.  Whereas most animals convert excess sugar to fat, bees convert sugar into wax.  They actually 'sweat' flakes of wax which they then harvest from their own bodies, chew, and then sculpt into those perfect, intricate hexagonal cells.

That same afternoon, I don't know what made me go back and examine the yellow hive, but when I did, something caught my eye on the ground just in front of the hive.  It was a blonde queen bee, climbing over and around a small cluster of bees who appeared to be ignoring her.  She seemed all alone, without any entourage, and she was soliciting.  She must have been newly-hatched, and I knew there were probably more of her kind around since I saw a number of queen cells when I opened the yellow hive to steal a frame of brood to put in with the swarm.  Well, I had the nuc box, which was teeming with bees from the swarm - I hadn't yet shaken them into the swarm hive.  So I took another frame of brood from the yellow hive, placed it in the nuc, and dumped the baby queen in.  Now, some 5 days later, bees are still in the nuc box, and taking down lots of sugar syrup - they will have gone through 1/2 gallon by tomorrow.

Back to the yellow hive.  The one swarm wasn't enough.  On Saturday, Team Yellow threw another swarm.  And again on Sunday.  And they both landed five feet away, right on the face of the new orange swarm hive, and within an hour they had entered the hive.  There were so many bees in this new hive that they couldn't all fit, and many were 'bearding', i.e. clustering, on the face of the hive.  Yesterday evening I filled the second story box with frames and refilled the feeder.  The curious thing is three swarms - and presumably 3 queens - in the same hive.  Are they fighting to the death in there?  I wonder which queen will prevail, because a colony with more than one queen is a very rare thing indeed.  I can only imagine that the pheromones exuded by the original wicked Yellow Queen are so powerful that they drew her daughters to her, even after she'd left them and was in another hive.

After the swarm events yesterday I went to Noyac to visit Bea and her bees.  Our friend Pat, who has bees in Riverhead, was also there.  Bea wanted help examining her hive from last year, and they were such a delight to work with:  gentle and cooperative.  I was excited to find the large, dark queen, who is laying up a storm and seems to have perfect control over her orderly subjects.  It made me realize just how delinquent my vicious Team Yellow really is.  Well, I am determined to change all that.  I will give my hives about a month to settle in and raise the next generation of workers.  At that point I will reassess for temperament and any queen who is making my life miserable will not be long for this world.  

To recap, from my original 3 hives, red, yellow and purple, the red seems to be behaving and is storing honey in the super I added last month.  Team Yellow presumably has a new queen, who will need to go on a mating flight, come back and start laying.  After about a month, there should be enough new bees for me to determine hive temperament.  Team Purple also swarmed on Saturday, but they settled in an area of bramble, cat brier, and poison ivy that is completely inaccessible, so I kissed that swarm goodbye.  As a result, I will now have a new queen in the purple hive too, so will have to assess temperament there as well in a month or so.  Then there's Team Orange, the triple swarm hive.  If the original Yellow Queen is still reigning supreme, she will have to be replaced, as she produces 'super-hot' bees.  If one of her daughters has already done her in, it will be another wait-and-see scenario.  Then there's that little blonde queen in the nuc box.  In about a week, I can open up the box to see if she had a successful mating flight.  If so, I should find eggs.  If that's the case, I will see how those bees develop.  Who knows, she may wind up being the replacement for a nasty queen, if she plays her cards right.

So why did my hives swarm and could I have prevented it?  I reversed hive boxes and added honey supers (see last post), even though some said that would slow down the bees.  That certainly wasn't the case.  I did the reversal around 4/20.  Did I reverse too late?  Had they already made plans to swarm by then?  Certainly it's possible.  I also have another theory, and that is that instead of adding a honey super, I should have added a fourth hive body.  I think that with large colonies, 3 medium 8-frame supers just don't give the queen enough room to maneuver.  Bea has 4 hive bodies on her very successful Noyac colony.  So when I came home yesterday I added a fourth box to the red hive's brood area.  Now the colony is 5 boxes high - 4 brood boxes and a honey super.

After a totally engrossing but exhausting week, I took it slow this morning, working on this post and enjoying a perfect Bloody Mary - made with fresh grated horseradish right from the garden.  And forget the celery garnish - instead, I used a crisp, just-picked spear of my Purple Passion asparagus.  So sweet and crunchy!

CHEERS!

#24. BEEKEEPING ANNIVERSARY

It was a just year ago this week that I picked up my two nucleus colonies of bees, and by last summer the two colonies expanded to three when I collected a swarm that had issued from the yellow hive.  So far it's been a tremendous learning experience on many fronts.  I have always thought of myself as an amateur naturalist, having spent many childhood summers thigh-deep in ponds and marshes, emerging covered in leeches and not a bit bothered.  My passion for the natural world continues to this day, but now I feel as though a confluence of events - living in the wilds of Montauk + keeping bees - has given me a keen, new, heightened sense of the natural world around me.

This week I had two newcomers to my garden, and if I hadn't been obsessively watching the hives I would have missed them both.  One day last week, near dusk, while gazing out over the bee yard I caught the movement of what I thought was the neighbor's dog just on the other side of the apiary fence.  Striding purposefully, gracefully, I thought it was odd that he appeared to be heading into the woods.  Then I saw the white tip at the end of his bushy tail and realized that it was not a dog at all, but a red fox; a very large one at that, and he just glided past the back of the hives and headed into a thicket of bramble and wild rose.  The last time I saw a fox at the house was over a year ago, and he was padding across my neighbor's snow-covered lawn in the pink dawn light.  Truly a National Geographic moment.  I wonder if the one I saw the other day was a relative.

Then yesterday an unfamiliar bird flew across my line of sight.  It's funny how one immediately picks out a stranger among the usual backyard denizens.  This brown bird had a long tail and a white underside.  At first I thought it was a small hawk,  but I noticed that none of the other birds had left the feeders, so I knew that it couldn't be a predator.  It flew low across the yard and landed on the wood chips in front of one of the bee hives.  It picked up a bee off the ground - whether a dead one or not I couldn't tell - and, working its beak like a pair of chopsticks, it tossed and rearranged the insect for a long time before it finally ate it.  Obviously the bird was well aware of the stinger issue and it either needed to get the bee in exactly the right position to avoid the venom, or perhaps it chomped and clamped until the stinger was amputated from the bee?  I went to my bird books to identify the attractive creature.  Thrasher came to mind, but they do not have a pure creamy white underside.  I found that it was a black-billed cuckoo.  Imagine, a bird as familiar as the cuckoo, and yet I don't think I've ever seen one.  I probably shouldn't have been so excited.  I know cuckoos are naughty birds, sometimes laying their eggs in another bird's nest for others to rear.  And she was, after all, eating my bees.  But I think I have upwards of 120,000 bees at the moment, so I don't mind sharing a few with the cuckoo.  To my surprise and delight she was back in the apiary this morning.  And she kept me company while I gardened nearby, flying just a few feet away only when Daphne the Norfolk Terrier mindlessly approached and startled both the cuckoo and herself.  This cuckoo is a brazen creature and I hope she spends a lot of time in the garden.  I understand that the their favorite food is caterpillars.  Just the kind of connoisseur a gardener needs!

And speaking of gardening, my friend Andrew brought over all kinds of earthmoving and other heavy equipment and we cleared at least 2000 square feet of scrubland adjacent to the hives for a new vegetable plot.  A daunting project to be sure, but thrilling nonetheless.  V. cool learning how to use these machines.  What we did in a matter of days would have taken me a year to accomplish with hand tools alone.  Then we used the dump truck to bring in 6 tons each of compost and rotted manure and roto-tilled it all in.  

This will increase my vegetable gardening capacity by about fourfold.  We've already planted about 150 feet of mixed heirloom potatoes.  Squashes, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and the like are still indoors in pots.  The old original 20' x 30' plot is about half-planted now with a variety of crops that don't take up a lot of room, like beets, carrots and radishes.  That's also where the purple asparagus lives, and I've been enjoying that treat for about the last two weeks.  I'll probably be able to pick stalks for another couple of weeks.  So yummy.  Another 12' x 12' plot is overflowing with garlic, onions and leeks, plus a couple of volunteer potatoes from last year that overwintered and are now over 12" high.  I think it's going to be a bumper year.

As for the bees, I finally did my first hive inspection about 10 days ago, and it was dramatic, to say the least.  The purple and red hives looked healthy, prosperous and unremarkable.  I saved the yellow hive for last, knowing that it might be a challenge.  Boy, was I ever right.  They were so savage that they stung my hands multiple times right through my heavy suede pruning gloves.  I actually had to retreat to the garage and put on a pair of nitrile gloves over the heavy work gloves.  That did the trick.  Once I felt secure that I wouldn't be stung, I could relax a bit and try to analyze the mayhem.  Strangely, the light smoking I employed seemed to rile rather than quiet them.  And once I finished taking the hive apart and rearranging things I hung back but stayed in the bee yard to see how long they would harass me.  The pounding of tiny bodies against my bee veil just didn't stop, so I moved to the picnic table about 60 feet away.  They followed me, but here's the amazing thing:  I had the hive smoker sitting on the table, still emitting wisps of smoke, and the bees seemed to be attacking not just me, but the metal smoker can.  Finally, one of them made a suicide assault and threw herself into the inferno, right down the molten mouth of the smoker.  I was astounded.  And even more so when a second bee pulled the same suicide stunt.

Given the extreme angst of the yellow hive, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when the occasional errant bee attacked Andrew and me as we worked in the garden the next day.  One of them pursued a neighbor as he walked his dog on the street later that afternoon.  My neighbor was cool about it, but I was not.  I can't have my bees going after people on the street, for heaven's sake.  Can it be that I am going to have to destroy Team Yellow?

I saw my beekeeping teacher Ray Lackey at a bee meeting last weekend and asked him about my experience.  He said that he has heard of some bees who, instead of being calmed by smoke are actually riled by it.  I asked him if he thought I should try spraying them with sugar water instead of smoke next time I inspect the hive.  He thinks that might work.  Of course he suggested going into the hive and finding the queen and 'replacing' (read 'murdering') her.  Team Yellow is so populous at this point that I don't have any confidence that I could find her.  I may be able to reduce the population, however, by manipulating the positions of the hives, tricking some of the members of Team Yellow to join the other colonies.  With a reduced population, it would be easier to find the yellow queen.

It took Team Yellow a good 3 or 4 days before they stopped chasing us around the yard.  Things are calm now, and I think I have several management strategies to try before I just throw a tarp over the hive and smother all its inhabitants.  Oh, that it has come to this.  I feel like I'm in a Shakespearean play.

I put honey supers on all three hives, hoping that with the early spring there might be an early honey flow.  We shall see.  Oh, and with the last of the honey, I'm planning to give mead making a try.  Perhaps I'll start a batch within the next week or two.              

#23. Bee Blogging Coast to Coast

Montauk Long Island hasn't always been my home.  Though my family and I have spent most summers here since the early 60's (and I've always known I would settle here eventually), up until a couple of years ago the S.F. Bay Area was my home of 30 years.

Of course, since moving to Montauk, I still keep in touch with a lot of my California crew.  My old friend Linda, who lives just south of San Francisco, in Belmont, CA, regularly sends me clippings from local papers about things she thinks I need to know.  Linda and I share a love of gardening, and she's been really interested in my beekeeping adventures.  Linda found out that a group of San Francisco Chronicle employees started keeping bees last year, around the same time I did.  They keep them on the rooftop of the Chronicle building, right in the middle of the City!  Through reading the Chronicle articles that have served as a diary of their project, I learned that Google, whose offices are located in Mountain View, CA (practically in my old backyard) also keeps bees.  They started their program about 2 years ago at the company's headquarters.  Eighty employees signed up to help tend the bees, and they extracted 400 lbs. of honey from 4 hives in their first year!  I freely admit to having felt somewhat envious.

Naturally, I started following the Google and Chronicle teams' exploits (for Google enter "hiveplex" in the search bar at http://googleblog.blogspot.com; the SF Chronicle is at http://www.sfgate.com/columns/honeybeechronicles/).  Recently, however, total admiration of what seemed to be runaway successes turned to consternation, empathy and fear.  It seems that one of the two hives on top of the Chronicle building has failed - the queen has absconded or died, leaving a few depressed, aimless bees to wander the empty combs; and 3 of the 4 Google hives have failed after the second year.

Interestingly, the one Google hive that survived had been prophylactically treated with antibiotics (to be used as a control group, I think).  Google wanted the hives to be managed in a natural way, without the aids (if 'aids' they are) of applied chemicals and medications.  The experienced beekeeper who is helping the Googlers has his own apiary, where he does feed antibiotics.  Google, understandably, didn't want to sign on to that protocol.  The suspected killer of the Google hives was varroa distructor.   My blog post #14 gives a full account of these horrible, death-dealing mites that have become the scourge of beekeepers globally.

This brings up the general question - perhaps the biggest one any beekeeper needs to face - about how to manage hives in the face of the myriad pests and pestilence that bees can fall prey to.  At the two extremes of the spectrum there is, at one end, those who believe that nothing should come in contact with the bees except hive parts: wood, wax, and maybe wire.  They do not believe in dietary supplements, plastic hive parts, feeding with sugar, or medications (whether preventative or curative), and many do not even wear protective clothing when they work the hives.  At the other end of the spectrum are beekeepers who throw everything available at their colonies - from artificial pollen patties, to prophylactic antibiotic treatments, to fumigants, to drugs illegally smuggled from foreign countries.

The impetus for the 'natural' end of the spectrum is often spiritually inspired, but it is probably just as often purely practical.  Master Beekeeper Ray Lackey, my instructor, has stopped all hive treatments in his 60 hives.  If I remember correctly, he said that the first year he lost 50% of his hives to pests and disease, but as survivor colonies replaced the lost populations his losses are now down to 5% annually.  That's pretty amazing anecdotal evidence suggesting that bees will breed for hardiness and hygiene (see my blog post #14 again) if given the chance.  In this scenario, by the way, bees are not brought in from other parts of the country - a universally common current practice - but are allowed to breed naturally from local stock.

The other end of the spectrum is exemplified by some commercial beekeepers who feel they cannot afford to lose hives, so they feed antibiotics to try to stem the tide of disease (much like in factory farming).  Of course then there is the problem of strains of pathogens and pests becoming resistant.  And when these chemically-dependant beekeepers are migratory (as many are), moving their apiaries all over the country, the diseases they may have been successful in suppressing in their own hives nevertheless spread to unprotected colonies in parts of the country where their bees visit, mate with, and infect, local populations.

Not surprisingly, hive management has been a huge topic of conversation among our South Fork Beekeeping group, a dedicated band of enthusiasts many of whom met through Ray Lackey's class.  I have developed my own strategy and we'll see how well it works:  I treated 2 of my 3 hives with an application of formic acid pads to kill varroa mites this past Autumn, after I'd taken the honey off the hives and egg-laying had slowed to a trickle.  (In nature, formic acid is a miticide produced by ants.  It's a powerfully pungent volatile compound - think smelling salts.)  To be honest, I didn't actually want to do even that.  But I panicked:  in September, at one of the last classes of our course at Cornell Cooperative Extension, samples were taken from the 6 hives in the Riverhead bee yard, and varroa infestation was diagnosed as moderate to severe.  (In one of the hives, the bees had been 'treated' with an 'natural' option of powdered sugar applications, which many say controls varroa.  The sample that later came from that hive showed just as large a varroa infestation as the 'un-sugared' hives.)

The bees at the Riverhead bee yard came from the same Southern suppliers as my own bees, so I had to conclude that my bees were similarly infested.  I made the decision that I was not willing to risk losing my colonies to varroa in my first season.  The prospect seemed just too demoralizing.  The one edgy decision I made was to not treat Team Purple - the swarm hive I collected in June (I describe the 'taking of the swarm' in post #17).  I would use them as a control group.  Also, because they were a younger (and therefore smaller) colony, I was afraid of what a significant population drop would due to them - the formic acid will result in some bee deaths along with killing varroa mites.

Had the formic acid treatment endangered the bees or the environment needlessly?  The jury is out.  What I can say is that the white plastic tray under the screened board at the bottom of my hive was loaded with varroa corpses at the end of the treatment period.  Would they have killed my colonies?  I don't know, but I now have the satisfaction of knowing that at least I disrupted the varroa breeding cycle for this coming season.  Next Autumn my plan is to treat all three hives with formic acid.  This will give me some indication of how heavily infested the untreated Team Purple was, compared to the 2 originally-treated hives.  If, after the next formic acid treatment, the varroa body count is down significantly compared to the past Autumn, I will consider stopping treatments in the coming years, or treating every 2 to 3 years.

Adopting a strategy for managing an apiary is a complicated issue, and one that I'm sure will take me years to develop.  I think the thing is to keep experimenting, learning, and doing research; have realistic goals and expectations; and use common sense.  I can say that I do not envision ever again 'importing' bees from another part of the country.  That just doesn't make sense to me.  I think I can breed all the bees I'll ever need right here in my own backyard.  Hell, I went from 2 hives to 3 in my first year, without even trying!

I will keep monitoring the Googlers and Chroniclers.  It's a great way to keep up on beekeeping news, including techniques, successes and failures, across the country.  And it's a terrific way to stay in touch with my beloved Bay Area.

Finally, speaking of California, when I drove across country a few years ago I brought with me some of my containerized fruit trees.  (I have to say that the ability to grow citrus in my own backyard was one of the thrills of living in CA that just never got old.)  One of the trees I relocated is a navel orange that is now bowing under the weight of ripe fruit. I keep it in my screened porch which is semi-winterized, meaning that the temp. never goes down much below 50°.  In the Spring I move it outside and then haul it back in when frost threatens, generally around late October/November.  It's kind of a pain, but well worth it when I have a sweet, juicy reward waiting for me at the end.

My other favorite containerized citrus is the variegated pink Eureka-type lemon.  The fruit (and leaves) are striped and the flesh is pink.  What a wonder!  I first saw it at COPA, the amazing - and tragically now-closed - food/wine/lifestyle complex in downtown Napa, California.  The outdoor edible gardens that were arranged in a tidy grid of raised beds was an inspiration the likes of which I had never before seen.  I just had to track down the pink lemon (which was actually pretty easy to do).  So far it hasn't fruited heavily, producing only a few ripe lemons a year.  But this year promises to be a bumper crop, I think.  And even if there were no fruit to be had, the heavenly scent of citrus blossoms wafting through the house in the depths of winter is intoxicating.